Whitewashing Race - (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In an updated new edition of this classic work, a team of highly respected sociologists, political scientists, economists, criminologists, and legal scholars scrutinize the resilience of racial inequality in twenty-first-century America.

Whitewashing Race argues that contemporary racism manifests as discrimination in nearly every realm of American life, and is further perpetuated by failures to address the compounding effects of generations of disinvestment. Police violence, mass incarceration of Black people, employment and housing discrimination, economic deprivation, and gross inequities in health care combine to deeply embed racial inequality in American society and economy.

Updated to include the most recent evidence, including contemporary research on the racially disparate effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, this edition of Whitewashing Race analyzes the consequential and ongoing legacy of "disaccumulation" for Black communities and lives. While some progress has been made, the authors argue that real racial justice can be achieved only if we actively attack and undo pervasive structural racism and its legacies.

About the Author

Michael K. Brown is Emeritus Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Martin Carnoy is Professor of Education and Economics at Stanford University.
Elliott Currie is Professor of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine.
Troy Duster and Marjorie M. Shultz are Emeritus Professors at the University of California, Berkeley.
David B. Oppenheimer is Clinical Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law.
David Wellman (1940-2022) was Emeritus Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.